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There are plenty of horror games that try to be scary with blood, zombies, and ghosts, but it's also possible for a game to be scary in a much less traditional sense. Interestingly, this can be a complete accident on the part of the developer. Anything from choosing poor music to forgetting to put NPCs in an area can contribute to a surprisingly creepy gaming experience, regardless of whether or not it was the original intent of the creators.

Whenever an NPC enters a conversation from out nowhere in Fallout 3. It'll be quiet. Nothing but the sound of the wasteland and then "HEY THERE, TRAVELER! LET ME HELP YOU SOIL YOURSELF!"
I swear to god I shit myself once... or twice... or thrice... It got me every damn time.

What always got me in NV was when I had a companion and they would run off without my knowing it to attack an enemy I couldn't see. I'd just be walking in the silence of the Wastes, and then suddenly and without warning there would be the deafening of FWOOSH of the kill cam. Makes me jump every damn time.

Victor was terrifying. Whenever you hit a certain point in the main quest, he would come and talk to you. However, he didn't just teleport in, he would actually run (well, wheel) towards you from really far away, so if you were looking around, you could see a random robot with a creepy face bombing towards you.

It made me jump a few times.

Also, you could never really trust him, so you were always expecting him to shoot you in the back or something.

God Victor did a number on my the first time I played NV. He's supposed to talk to you the first time you get to Novac, apparently. I didn't know that. I rented the hotel room and slept for a while because I was ailing pretty bad. I wake up and Victor is IN THE ROOM. HOVERING OVER THE BED TO GREET ME.

I found those little floating robots spouting propaganda to be creepy as shit. You'd hear this voice approaching from a distance... and then this flying eye pops up over the hill, singing a patriotic song. Something so wrong about it in the wasteland, to see functional, flying robots.

I once was travelling in a cave on a side mission. As with most caves, this one had all manner of unpleasantries in it. Suddenly, and NPC who I had talked to over a week beforehand (an actual week, not a fallout week) and forgotten about across the map comes up behind me to start a conversation. I have never been so terrified in all of my life. He's fortunate the dialogue box opened, or else I would have blown his head off.

Underwater levels in anything. Even cutesy underwater levels like the ones from Mario Bros. 3 give me the shivers. Being slow and not quite in control of your character while creatures of the deep try to murder you through the murk of the deep... it's psychological, but it's freaky for me.

Banjo Kazooie with Clanker's Cavern and Treasure Trove Cove. Yeah...that giant metal shark scared the crap out of me, and then the game wants you to go inside of it. All I kept thinking about when swimming around in that cavern was, "Is it going to eat me? Is it going to eat me? Is it going to eat me?" And then frickin' Snacker the Shark. Just screw everything about that guy. Supposedly you can kill him, but I was too busy screaming like a little girl trying to swim away from him all the time to try.

I thought I was free. For years I lived free of that fear. Then I came over to my brother's house and he said he had picked up Endless Ocean.

I mean, I guess it's okay. I didn't want to swim in the ocean again in my life anyway.

The first time I played through FF7 there were many creepy parts of the game. The one that stands out the most to this day is in the Gi cave in cosmo canyon... that fucking face at the end of the cave still gives me shivers. Possibly because I was younger when I played through the game for the first time. Also the first zombie in resident evil is one of the creepiest fucking things ever.

Cave Of The GI didn't really bother me after I turned down the sound, but Shinra Mansion. Fuck man. Even at level 85 I wouldn't go in there even though I could 1 hit anything in there. To fuckin creepy.

YES! That moment was incredible. If I remember correctly, you're captured by the ShinRa and left in a cell overnight. In the morning your cell is unlocked for some reason and everything is eerily quiet. When you exit the cell, there's blood and slaughtered guards everywhere and you have no idea why.

I found that the entirety of Shadow of the Colossus to be pretty unsettling, but the worst for me has to be the two smaller colossis, Cenobia and Celosia.

They just won't stop chasing you, ever. Especially when you climb onto a platform and it sort of gives you a false sense of security, until you realize you have to eventually jump back down to face them.

I could see that one being the creepiest colossus, mostly because of the slowness and lack of intensity. There is no monster swinging a fist/sword at you or a giant animal thing charging you really quickly. You're just floating in the lake waiting for a giant eel to surface and try to shock you while he swims around below you.

Oh man, the sand-snake thing that you need to let chase you. He got so close, his eyes so piercing, it skeeved me out for a week.
Also, going back to the previous Colossus battlegrounds to see their corpses decomposing into soil and moss was absolutely haunting.

I thought the colossus you fight in the coliseum, Kuromori, was the scariest. He has the creepiest theme, and his face is just so...alien. The other colossi are at least based off of animals or look like friendly giants. And the fact that he exhales poison gas that fills half a floor is awful. Fuck that guy, fighting him gave me the willies.

I'll start with Wet-Dry World from Mario 64. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but something about this level leaves me feeling very unsettled, as if I'm the last person alive in this world.

I'm sure the surprisingly creepy music doesn't help, but there are a lot of other things that add up to make this a creepy level. For one thing, none of the enemies are your prototypical cartoon Mario baddies. There are no cute turtles or bombs and no oddly proportioned goombas. Instead, the only real threats around floating, fire-spitting orbs, giant bugs, and windup toys that somehow rewind themselves on their own.

Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this, but the level's skybox just makes me feel so small. Mario 64's levels usually feel huge, but the fact that this massive world is just a speck in the middle of a huge city just gives me the shivers. The fact that the image used may also be a real-world photograph just feels very odd next to such a cartoonish game.

Finally, there's the last area of the level--a flooded village where the townsfolk are nowhere to be found. What happened to them all? There are probably about ten houses and a church in the area, but there is absolutely nobody around except Mario.

Something about such that level seems like it could be some Twilight Zone episode's interpretation of Hell.

Now that you think about it, the castle is a little on the creepy side. Maybe the limitations of the hardware kept them from putting in many NPCs, but you're absolutely right--it's totally empty! Well, except for all of the ghosts in the courtyard, that is.

The first time I saw the bunny in the basement scared the living fuck out of me. I didn't know what it was, up to that point the place had been empty, then all of a sudden you see this thing sitting in the hall and it just runs away.

Oh, agreed. I'd love to hear an explanation from the developers about this level. Like what the idea behind it was, or what the deal with the skybox is. It just seems so...surreal juxtaposed with the typical Mario world.

There is another skybox in the game that has fascinated me to no end. Do you remember the background of "Bowser in the Dark World"? I'm pretty sure the skybox is supposed to look like stalactites in a cave, but something about it just looks so deep and endless.

There is no music, only (some creepy) sounds effects. It is First Person View. The graphics are kind 3D amateur, which is gives a creepy atmosphere. You have to keep managing torches to not stay in the dark.

The game never attempts to scare you. There is no violence or fright moments. But hearing the enemies steps without knowing where they are, a surprise attack while you are sleeping, or just the game atmosphere is creepy as fuck.

In donkey kong 64, if you dicked around in the fps parts too long it would say "GEET OUT" in this menacing death voice and a timer would start of like 30 seconds no matter where you were and you'd explode or something. Anyways I cried.

Elizabeth in bioshock infinite sometimes does the same. You are in a lower part of the building and you can see her looking at something, you don't bother and go upstairs, but then you wonder why you don't hear her following you. Then you move back and she's gone, you go upstairs and you see her leaning against a wall, even though she never passed you.

That's how this game makes having a companion not a terrible experience. Because in every other game ever, the companion always gets stuck walking into a wall or something and you have to go back and say "come on dumbass"

Yeah, Elizabeth does warp closer to the player at times when she's stuck or too far away. If she didn't do that, you would have to go back and get her sometimes.

Ya know - now that I think of it - I've never actually saw her warp. The game is really good about hiding that from your field of view.

I saw her warp once during my play through -- was really really creepy. She ran at like 1,000 MPH to the other location and then acted like nothing happened. There was some weird stretching involved with the model as well. I thought for sure she would just teleport to avoid weird glitches, but the model actually travels the distance.

She got stuck on a skyline in my playthrough once. I got a good distance ahead and noticed she was gone. Backtracked for quite some time before finding her just hanging from a skyline with sparks shooting out like she was moving, but she was just...hanging there...

This will sound silly, but I was always deathly afraid of infantry missions in Red Alert 2 because one attack dog or one defensive turret could wipe out your commander and force you to restart. You literally had to micromanage your troops so they would walk the correct path and stop when you needed them too. It was always frustrating that when you sent an infantry unit marching, that if they get shot they just keep on walking.

I think this actually made me love this missions more. My favorites were the ones where you played as just Tanya or the one where all you got was 2 Yuri's. Or the one in Yuri's Revenge where you get to run around as Boris.

Not being able to lose anyone made these missions feel very tense, and I enjoyed them immensely as a kid.

The Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time. There are some temples in that game that are designed to be frightening, sure, but I don't think that the Forest Temple was one of them. It's really unsettling to me, though, possibly due to the haunting, almost Radiohead-like soundtrack. I always get lost in this temple to, and the repetitive percussive bit of the music gets in my head and makes me feel insane. Throw in the odd Wallmaster, and you've got a pretty terrifying whole.

This was definitely the most unnerving temple and I love it because of that atmosphere. The Shadow temple or the well doesn't even come close to this temple in terms of freakiness. The forrest temple is also my favorite temple in the game too. They did a really with the whole forgotten overgrown feeling and the music is just great.

I'm pretty sure the Forest Temple was designed to be creepy, but it definitely did a good job of being scary in a more unorthodox sense. I'd call the Forest Temple much more creepy than the Shadow Temple.

Forest temples in Zelda tend to be creepy. I had trouble finishing Woodfall Temple in Majora's Mask because of how creepy it was. More than half of the temple was suspended in darkness and required torch-lighting puzzles. Also, that music. Hectic drums, random screeching noises, and a ululating vocal line. And let's not forget the bizarre, towering, chanting jungle guardian, Odolwa.

I agree that this is a scary ass dungeon but you really don't think it was designed with that intent? The warping hallways, wallmasters, all the paranormal stuff that happens in that temple, and the music all set a very decidedly creepy tone.

In any video game, I HATE being chased by something. Just knowing that I'm not facing something that is trying to kill me frightens me more than anything.

Even if I have weapons, just knowing that an enemy is behind me and trying to kill me (whether through design or by me just missing it) makes me want to quit playing.

Also, even though the game was intended to be scary as a whole, in the new Slender game when you walk upon the first house in the very beginning of the game, just looking at the outside of the house and walking in was creepy anyway, just because the first Slender game taught me to hate closed, confined places (bathroom area, specifically).

It's my favorite RE game. I was probably around 13 or so when I played for the first time. I remember one time in particular I was wandering through a building and out of nowhere Nemesis busts through the wall right next to me. It scared the crap out of me... I remember screaming and frantically running away (I screamed in RL and ran away in the game... just to clarify) and when it was over my heart was pounding and my hands were sweaty... I had to take a break from the game.

A lot of people have that fear of the vastness of things, like the ocean or space. Well I get that same feeling in Civilization V when you go out into a remote part of the ocean and zoom in so all you see and hear is the ocean. It makes you feel like everyone that existed never existed.

Often on gta v, on multiplayer, when ever there was a heli whore, and shit got out of hand, my group of friends would grab a few boats and escape the city. I we would travel so far out, we couldn't see the city. The sound of war would fade and there would be nothing but the ocean.

Oh man, same thing in just cause 2. The ocean is literally infinite. You can just fly a plane in any direction and never end up anywhere. It really gives the creepy impression that you're in this weird world where nothing else exists but that island.

Space doesn't bother me in games, but the level Open Ocean in Ecco on the Genesis definitely did. It's just a completely featureless ocean level with sharks as the only enemy (if I remember right). I found that incredibly unsettling.

That level scared the hell out of me as a kid. It's not sharks, though, it's whales. You'll be swimming along in an empty ocean and then BAM! A giant whale swims up and bellows its mighty call.

The first time I played that level the first whale scared me so badly I swam full tilt to the other side with my eyes closed. Then I realized you couldn't exit the stage without "talking" to every single whale. And they don't stay on the screen after you leave them behind; every single time you approach one it suddenly appears on the screen with a scream.

Fuck that level.

EDIT : Just tried to find this level and it turns out I'm thinking of "Big Water" from Ecco II. "Open Ocean" from the original is indeed filled with sharks and also incredibly terrifying.

While we're on the subject of Zelda games, I'd like to throw in Ocarina of Time.. The skeleton that rose up during night time in Hyrule field were terrifying as a kid. (Though that one was almost definitely intended)

Clocktown has its own eerie music, it just takes a little time to get to it. Day 1 the music is cheerful and relaxingly paced. Day 2 is the same relaxing music, but its speeded up a little, as if telling you to get a move on. The last day is this- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjXutKsizE8

There was one point in STALKER that I was exploring some abandoned power station or something, not sure if it was part of the main plot or not, but I was looking around, and it was all dark... and I hear something behind me. I spin around and a bottle rolls out of a pile of trash. Ok... then it starts floating. Then some other crap starts floating, a toilet seat I think it was. And I'm like FUCK THIS and I run into another room, and I think everything is cool until I see this little will o wisp thing floating around. I think to myself "Ok this is weird but not so bad" and then A LINE OF FIRE SHOOTS OUT OF IT and I ran away from the whole fucking experience. Fuck that place, it was like a nightmare.

With some modes in the original SoC, they added in the dwarves... time for a story.

So, I don't remember what mod I installed (I think it was the Complete mod), and I was doing the X18 mission in that one valley, can't remember since I haven't played it for a long while. As usual, being 1) scared shitless of being in this valley in general and 2) even more scared of the labs, I was already on edge when I went in.

I had my trusty shotgun with me, and I was walking down the steps into X18, snooping around, killing the occasional snork, and avoiding those anomaly. Eventually, when I went further into the facility, where the light provided by anomalies was nowhere to be found and darkness was your only friend, I heard it.

I heard a little girl crying.

Now, naturally, all my alarms went off and my head was screaming "SHIT'S GONNA GET REAL, MAN, IF ANYTHING MOVES YOU LOAD THAT MOTHERFUCKER FULL OF LEAD!" So I began looking around, fueled by a mix of terror and restrained urine. I never found anything, but the crying never stopped. Stuff floated around and smashed into the ground and walls, keeping me on edge. I was a walking basket case by the time I ran into it.

I found a locked door that led to nowhere, a random prop stuck into the wall when it struck. When I saw the damage indicator I whirled around and flashed my light straight into that ugly asshole's face. And I unloaded on that guy like you wouldn't believe. This being the first time I played with the mod and also the first time I ever ran into a dwarf, I didn't know what he was capable of.

So when I realized that not only was he capable of throwing shit around in the air, he was also blocking my bullets with some sort of telepathic shield, I, being sensible enough to realize that I sure as hell didn't want to test my chances against this guy, hightailed it out of there faster than Usain Bolt.

I never went back. And in every playthrough of SoC I've done, I always stop at X18.

The Zone, man... you see some crazy shit in there.

EDIT: I later learned that it was the dwarf that was making the crying sound. That was probably the most fucked up shit I've ever ran into in the Zone. I'll gladly take bloodsuckers in the pitch black of night any day... at least with their glowing eyes and heavy breathing, I know where to throw my bullets. The glory of STALKER was that it isn't scary as it is the atmosphere filling in the details for you.

I remember that too, but my reaction was different. As soon as I heard the crying, I started to sprint around the whole complex to find the source. I hate being in suspension, so I started to search for this motherfucker. The moment I saw it, I unloaded all my magazines and proceeded to tea bag.

I'm all for violence, horror, and creepy but the quick time events in God of War 3 when ripping off Helios' head and sawing off Hermes' legs are about my limit. The devs dragged it out so long, I felt like a serial killer.

yeh, the point of the story is revenge and they need that super powered ultra violence to get a satisfying feeling for the revenge. Some people find it cathartic. Some people find it just plain awesome. Its your preference, really, some people get squeamish with violence, even pretend violence and other people like it, especially the pretend violence, because you can satisfy those kind of feelings and NOBODY is getting hurt..

The fish feeding levels in the Donkey Kong Country games. Knowing you have this ape-eating beast that is only sedated by feeding on other fish gives the game a sense of urgency and anxiety. Freaked young me out. Those levels were tense.

I was playing Pokemon Black (this is my first playthrough) earlier today, and wandered into Lostlorn Forest where I found the woman who, as it turns out, is actually Zoroark in disguise who does not have any dialog. It just seemed so out of place in the world of Pokemon and I don't know why, but it creeped me out a little bit.

Reminds me of the Old Chateau in D/P, where if you go into certain rooms you can see the contents of the adjacent rooms due to the top down view. Just seeing a little girl stand there in another room, then walk out was mega creepy.

It's a small thing, but at the very beginning of Bioshock. The ocean water is so incredibly black, and the sky is black as well except for the one bright patch around the moon. Now, most people don't notice, because everything is still pretty lit up thanks to the fire and the lighthouse. And usually you just walk straight into the lighthouse and get the game started. But when you get to the door, stop. Take a look around. Even better, walk down the other side and out into the water as far as you can. All you can hear is the water, and suddenly the lighthouse doesn't seem so big anymore. It's scary just how small it makes you feel. Also, that deep, dark water is pretty unsettling too.

On a related note, in Alan Wake there is a part near the end of chapter 3 in a coal mine (when you are traveling back to the lake). It's a pretty straight line, but there us a detour you can make down a side tunnel where you find a page. It's sitting next to this innocuous, quiet little grotto of pitch black, inky water. It seems like something that would have some significance (its even accompanied by a flashback) but its never mentioned. I just find it unsettling.

When a game adds slight touches of detail that makes the environment feel alive and lived in, I really get immersed. It can be an arrangement of props, or the right chord of music, or a bit of overheard dialogue. The right additions in the right place can make all the difference in the world.

Case in point, the moment in Half-Life 2 in the canals when you first acquire the airboat. The path splits from the main canal into a dead end, which seems like a mistake until you get off the boat and find an elevated plywood hut with a soiled mattress and a dead body, all under a slowly turning windmill. There's a windchime somewhere, singing out lonely notes that are barely heard above the wind. It's an amazing and wholly missable detail if you're not the explorative type.

The tunnel on Highway 17 with all the broken down cars really, really got me. I was 12 at the time, and I had barely managed to play through Ravenholm, mainly due to the fast zombies.

Now, the coast had an eerie atmosphere all on it's own, but couple that with the fact that I drive into this tunnel unknowing of what awaits me (there had been plenty of ordinary tunnels), it scared me maybe even more than Ravenholm did.
It felt like that scene in 28 Days Later with the rats; the car can't move, zombies are all around me, and I can hear fast zombies approaching.

I ended up abandoning the car, out of fear of meeting the fast zombies, and completed the rest of the chapter on foot.

Yeah I first played it when I was really young too. At that time, the whole fucking game was a horror game for me. Even in the beginning I remember being terrified when the cops raid the tenant housing and you just see people getting their faces smashed in by batons as you ran away.

But I agree-- I actually found the coast to be more eerie than Ravenholm. Something with the overcast skies, the abandoned villages, and creepy fog just really gave me a strange feeling.

I forgot about all these moments in HL2. The game is almost trying to shelter you from the horrors of the world and leave a lot of it up to the gamer to choose to discover or think about (empty, rusting playgrounds, children's toys, yet no kids or teenagers) and some of those discoverable moments are really unnerving, I remember finding bodies, torn up, in a dead end in a sewer being particularly bad. Also the significance of all the deserted cars is never forced upon you, it's only if you stop to think about the significance of it, instead of just terrain to navigate.

Tomb Raider (the original). That t-rex was so scary. You hear him, you feel him because of the ground shaking, but you don't see him while running. That was some adrenalin rush back at the time. No idea if my reaction would be the same today. I guess it would...

The early Tomb Raider games had so many creepy and atmospheric moments! This track still gives me chills.

Anyway, I remember killing the T-Rex for the thousandth time. Proceeded through the dino-valley as usual, got to the bridge and jumped over and the camera shifts to a top-down view and the T-Rex (dead of course, but I didn't realize at first) is right under me! Scared the hell out of me.

The sheer scale of space you feel in Freelancer, even though the planets, moons, stars and the spaces between them are still miniscule.

The asteroid and dust cloud fields I found terrifying - and the sheer amount of systems outside of the "civilised" areas, patrolled by bandits, or worse. You could set yourself on an automatic course through some of those edge systems to explore, and find yourself emerging from the thick gas dangerously close to a pair of gas giants. The amazing, spooky soundtrack didn't help, either.

Might sound strange, but Zoso (IIRC the raining town where you go to find Terra after she did her thing) creeped me the fuck out. It's dark, the Behemoth fight is much harder than most fights the player has seen up to that point, and then I fund myself sweating as I walked around hoping to avoid random encounters.

I agree. The town is just so damned bizarre and disorganized. It was a true creepy dungeon of sorts. Also Kefka's tower was pretty creepy in the world of ruin. Most of the world of ruin gave me a desolate, isolated feel. It actually enhanced the ending of the game when you finally defeat kefka. Most games have you defeat the evil bad guy right before he destroys the world. Defeating kefka gives you a sense of satisfaction because he destroyed the world, and you stopped him from further destroying it. Damn I'm getting goosebumps talking about it.

EDIT: This music is probably what really helped it feel as it did. Nobuo Uematsu is a fucking genius.

That's also what I love about Final Fantasy VI. It's one of the first, and certainly one of the best RPGs to ask "What if you lost"? You aren't fighting to stop the world you love from being destroyed; the world was already destroyed. But still you fight. Even though he already won, your characters fight Kefka, because damnit, he doesn't get to rule the world just because he destroyed it. The human spirit remains indomitable, and even the literal end of the world and insurmountable odds against an omnipotent demigod won't stop people from fighting to the last.

Forget that: the world rips itself apart and you end up on an island trying to catch fish to stay alive. You don't know who is where, if any of your friends or characters survived.... You don't even know that Kefka took over until you start asking around. Sure, you can go gather everyone back together (and learn about each character's backstory in the process), but you can also just level up and march two people in and end the game on a big pile of question marks.

Earthbound's Cave of the Past. And the funny thing is I don't even mean the final dungeon. I mean the location in the current time where the final dungeon takes place (so technically it's the Cave of the Present).

The music just doesn't even follow any sort of rhythm, which makes it really jarring. It doesn't help that you can accidentally walk into the cave in the deep underworld before you normally go there, even though there's nothing you can do inside the cave. It's the farthest corner of the entire world of Earthbound, and there's nothing there and the music made me shit my pants.

Ecco The Dolphin scared me as a kid. As has been mentioned previously, the idea of plunging into deep water is quite scary, especially as the game gets darker and darker the further down you go. Although I think what really does it, is the aliens! Especially in Ecco 2, the first time you see one is just floating in the ocean with no warning or context at all...all of the enemies up to that point are just sharks and jellyfish! Scared the hell out of me!

There's a fantastic indie adventure game called Kentucky Route Zero that's out now, that's not really meant to be scary, just kind of bizarre and artistic. There's a scene you can run across that's not marked on the map and has no real purpose, but gets its own animation anyway; there are a few other stops you can make like that but they're all just done in text and sound effects, aside from this one, just labeled "airplane."

What it shows is two men pushing an airplane down the highway. Your character notices that they look like they're about to pass out from exhaustion, and that the wheels on the landing gear are almost completely worn out, meaning that soon the men will have to drag the plane along with them. You can't talk to them; all you can do is watch, and then leave.

What makes this unsettling to me is that the game tells you almost nothing about these men, but it is sure to give you a feeling that what they're doing is important somehow, because they've clearly been pushing this airplane for a long time, perhaps days, even weeks on end, seemingly without stopping. What's brilliant is that the game stops telling you what's going on right when you're about to ask something that might help you make sense of what you're seeing, so you're left with a deep-seated feeling of confusion. You know -what- you saw, but it doesn't make sense to you. It's really cool.

I played the game after not having slept for almost two days. The game isn't intended to be scary/horror but GODDAMN I was incredibly just unsettled by the game at the end. Something about it just didn't sit with me right.

When I was little I played a game called 3D Body Adventure. Because I was so young I didn't really understand what to do but the hospital part always freaked me out. The music with the body parts and long corridors just didn't sit right

The original Mass Effect - if you choose to have your Commander Shepard grow up on Mindoir, then a side-mission presents itself about a third of the way into the main questline. You're asked to intervene in a standoff between C-Sec and a thoroughly disturbed woman who survived the slaughter that killed your family.

Mass Effect as a trilogy has some stand-out moments of scriptwriting and voice acting, but this is by far and away one of the best-written pieces in the entire franchise, IMHO. And just creepy, disturbing....and wonderful.

Minecraft single-player, especially when you first start out. That terrifying feeling of being completely alone in a strange new world, with (initially) nothing to defend yourself with. Made even worse the first time you hear (but not see) a zombie. The Herobrine mythos made it even freakier!

Even in multiplayer, the first time I went to the Nether and heard a ghast... freaked me out.

Especially when you're walking along and you think they're far away and you hear them SHRIEK; you know you have about three seconds to see where the attack is coming from (usually above or behind you where you didn't see them coming) before you get blasted. And god help you if you don't have a bow.

Ya, the whole post-apocalyptic future setting has always scared me. I've had dreams about nuclear blasts and desolation and such since I was very young (10-12), which is odd since I didn't grow up in that Cold War era (I'm 27).

Metro 2033, especially the above ground areas, are terrifying. It's funny how most games, you relish being on the bright surface and away from the oppressive confines of underground exploration and dungeons, but it's the complete opposite in Metro.
Whenever you finally get back to the metro tunnels after having been on the surface is such a huge relief.

The giant hand made of seaweed in the abandoned ship dungeon in Okami gave me nightmares as a kid. It wasn't that it was creepy looking, it was that knowing if you messed up a jump and fell into the water it would instantly try and grab and kill you that freaked me out.

DotA 2: playing as the enchantress. Every other hero in the game generally has some reason why they're fighting and killing lots of creatures and other heroes, and their mood mostly fits. She just acts like a cheerful nobody, but she also gets to be pretty devastating as she builds up. Freaks me out. "La la la" murder someone "oh, ha ha ha ha! What a surprise.."

For me, it happened in Red Orchestra 2. For those of you unfamiliar, Red Orchestra 2 is a realistic WWII shooter that does a fantastic job at immersion and making you feel panicked (i.e. when you're reloading and there are 4 Germans with Kar 98s about to shoot at you).

The most unsettling part for me came during a match on the map, Commissars House. We were holding objective A, which is just a two story, rather narrow rectangular building with most of the roof blown out. It is usually a slaughter for both sides if the battle focuses on that objective first. It got the point where it was close to the end of the game and I was one of the last people still alive against 20-30 players on the German side. By some miraculous feat of teamwork, we held them at A and we were now hiding and making sure we took out whoever came at us before we fell.

I was hiding in a corner, my PPSH trained on the single stairway leading up to the second floor. By this point, my heart had been racing, trying to stay alive since we had lost our last wave of reinforcements. I had only 2 magazines left (I had not yet unlocked the drum magazine for the PPSH, so I only had a 30 round magazine to fire with), a single grenade, and sidearm I took off my dead comrade who was lying in a pool of blood and with no arms. Two more of my comrades lay dead beside me. One had been shot and was slumped against the window, his eyes still open and staring at me. The other had been hit by HE shell from a PZIV, and was lying next to me without any limbs. Although I was intensely focused on staying alive, I became distracted and unsettled by the sight of the mutilated bodies around me, and how I had survived without any damage. I began to examine them, and I became inexplicably paranoid.

Then the Germans entered the bottom floor.

I could hear their npc's talking in german. I could hear the low pounding of their boots on the floor below me. I could hear muffled crunching in the snow. They had surrounded me.

My heart beat faster and I could feel myself about to sweat. I did not know what to do. Should I hold my position? Should I take the fight to them? Then I heard them come up the stairs slowly. I panicked slightly, but held my ground, focusing on the stairs.

"Achtung! Handgranate!

Two Mod.24 Stielhandgranate plunked off the the wall facing the stairs and at my feet. I sprinted into the room behind me and just barely made it around the corner when both went off. The floor in front of me was blown out and I could clearly see 3 Germans below me. I took out two of them with quick bursts from my PPSH. The third fired once, missed, and then was downed by another burst. I reloaded, then quickly turned around and leaned out, taking out two riflemen who had charged up the stairs. I threw my grenade down the stairs. I sprinted, darting into an adjacent room. I could hear my heart pounding as I cleared the room and the one adjoining it. I heard more footsteps, which prompted me to check my ammo and charge out. As I peaked out, another German was waiting and fired a long burst from his MP-40, I ducked and sprayed the stairs with a long burst from my own weapon and downed him. I charged down the stairs, rounded the corner and found the rest of their team waiting for me at the bottom, I sprinted back up the stairs. I was followed by Germans, bullets, and a few grenades. I managed to get out of there with only a wound to my arm. I patched myself up, then aimed down the stairs. Two of them came up and I fired at them. I anticipated I had enough to kill both of them, but when only 4 rounds came out and one of them died, I ran from the stairs, pulling out my revolver. I edged my way back and aimed, firing two rounds as the German ran up. One in the heart, one in the head. Another one leaned out from the bottom and I shot him twice. I dropped my ppsh and took one of their rifles with a bayonet. I charged down the stairs and straight into the last two Germans. I bayoneted the first poor bastard, but the second shot me in the abdoment and I was mortally wounded. The screen was fading to black, and when I went to fire back, the only sound I heard was a disheartening "click." He fired again, and I was dead. The round was lost, but not before I had cut my way through all but one of the attackers.

Although it sounds like more of a story of a fantastic round of gameplay, it was unsettling to have to wait for the enemy in a room of mutilated corpses, and to get to this point while having your teammates cut down and screaming as they are mortally wounded. Hearing the footsteps of the enemy team below was unsettling and I was panicked throughout that short firefight. It lasted only 3 minutes from when they entered the building, but it was both exciting and unnerving.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It's an old Lucasarts adventure.

There's a part when the woman you've been partnered with the entire adventure gets possessed by the spirit of an Atlantean god and you have to free her from it.

Her tone changes, she acts brashly and commandingly towards you and the necklace around her neck youve been interacting with the entire game has now acquired an evil aspect. Good stuff all round. I was about 8 when I completed it 20 years ago, though.

I am finally starting Bioshock Infinite, and there is a moment very early on in the game where you see the explicit racism of Columbia, this is also the moment where Columbia's facade breaks away and the game shifts into shooting. Prior to this moment you just walk around being engrossed by the setting and how perfect everything seems.

Definitely, upon my second playthrough I can look at it with a bit more attention but when playing through it initially I didn't really care that much. Maybe I just expected it? Perhaps given the setting it just wasn't a theme that was supposed to come as a surprise to me.

Drakengard. The more endings you get, the more disturbing it becomes. The third or forth "final" campaign has giant babies with mouths full of teeth descending from the sky. They devour one of your team mates and you have to fight them. I played that level at like 2 in the morning and it made me physically ill with how disturbing and scary it was.

The final world in Kingdom Hearts. The "Heartless" world, which is made up of the remains of broken worlds. Invisible paths, endless purple backdrops and an eternally looping music track. Not to mention that goddamn Czernobog boss fight, floating in an endless void fighting a giant devil demon.

I have an irrational fear of large sea creatures, so when I was a kid, there were a lot of parts of Skies of Arcadia that mortified me. Things like the Dark Rift and Deep Sky were obviously supposed to be scary (just looking at that vortex from above gave me the chills), but things like the giant squid north of Crescent Isle and that weird spider thing in the Lands of Ice creeped me out immensely, even if they were pretty easy fights. I was actually too scared to fight Obispo at first, my dad forced me to.

In Zelda II: Adventure of Link, there's a sub quest regarding returning a lost thing to an NPC. However, in those days of one-line dialogue, and no other way to identify the dude, the NPC simply states "I AM ERROR."

As a youth I wondered if it meant the game was damaged, or if I was going to lose my save file, or something like that. Unsettling to the max, when if affects "real life"!

I would have to say the first time you encounter the Vampbees in Brave Fencer Musashi. They don't tell you much about what's going on (You just get a creepier tune going in town, and people saying odd things are going on). However, maybe it's just me, but it creeped me out when I fell asleep in the middle of town and at night, the doors to the restaurant in town just fly open with these large creatures barreling out. They can't be attacked and when approached, I think the text box only says "..."

You don't really find this in games made this gen (due in part to better graphics/shaders and prevalence of set pieces), but theres something about certain type of emptiness that really gets me. Probably the best examples are from pc games made between ~97-05, many of which use the Quake 2/3 engine. What creeps me out are the rooms and hallways that are awkwardly lite (just dark enough to cause discomfort, practically empty with the exception of maybe a blocky couch, unnaturally long (for hallways) and wide (for rooms), low-res textures generally, and extra creepy if they lead nowhere or are just there without any purpose.

If I wasn't on my phone I'd pull some screen shots so this wouldn't sound so weird. For some reason (and I haven't played this game in years, don't even like it really) Postal 2 sticks out as an good example. Most of the buildings just have these stark hallways that go on and on, rooms that are just dead ends, and all with a lighting I just can't explain. Games like that and most others probably didn't intend for any eerieness but for some reason I always found some. System Shock 2 kind of stands out as one that maybe recognized the creepiness of low-res emptiness and exploited it.